You Don’t Have Time to Write

For years, 19 in fact, I was a writer who never wrote. I had a poorly-nurtured talent, and I figured I’d scribble a story down here and there and it wouldn’t be long before I was in bookstores. I soon became frustrated because there was an insistent, yearning urge inside me that demanded I write. And the more I didn’t write, the more condemning that voice became.

Along the way, I accumulated volumes of writing cliches. From reading countless articles about and by authors and countless author interviews, being in and out of writers groups, and generally being around a writer’s life, I possessed a lot of un-applied wisdom about writing. I recognized these nuggets as wisdom, as the thoughts of those at the top of their game. But I didn’t fully understand them because I didn’t live them.

And then I became a writer. Money, fame, and publication haven’t happened. Yet, I hope, at least for the publication. It’s a process, a journey — to get into cliche territory. I now know where I am on that journey, internally before worrying about externally, on a journey I see and control rather than one that collapses on itself under its own weight. I am more happy where I am now because I’m doing what I want rather than achieving or trying to achieve something that is not my standard of success.

The one area of writing in which nothing stuck was a writer’s routine. Despite the incessant ingesting of anecdotes and advise, often reduced to memorable turns of phrase, especially now with literary-minded Twitter accounts, and despite my own many attempts to establish a routine, to start producing, nothing has ever stuck except this complaint: “I don’t have time to write.” Partly because of my contrarian nature and partly because I viewed “I don’t have time” as an excuse, even if a true and valid one, I’ve bristled when others have said it. In refusing to use the excuse myself, I took on a more general condemnation of myself for failing to be a writer. In turn this created a self-fulfilling prophesy loop that I’ve only within the last two years or so escaped (but which I can slip into more easily than I can get out of).

Everyone that says it, which I’d bet is everyone, is correct. 100%. You don’t have time to write. Unless you’re wealthy enough to not work, already making enough money from your writing to work at it full-time (which still isn’t enough time to write everything you want to write), or a very disciplined drug dealer, you don’t have time to write.

But that sentence gets cut off. The full sentence is: “You don’t have time to wrote the way you think you’d like to write.” Be honest, because the truth is the truth regardless of your honesty. A writer owns his/her writing. It comes from within, deep within, and it’s more the writer’s than a child is a parent’s. How could something so important be bad? Because if I, the writer, am invested in the story I’m writing, if I’m trying my best to write something good, and I am good, then how can what I write be less than amazing? All I need is the perfect pen-pencil-computer-chair-desk-room-view-time of day-weather-celestial alignment. In the search for perfection, it never is.

Writers write.

That’s a complete sentence. It’s not missing “best-sellers,” “books,” or “publishable material.” Writers do. Writers write.

So do it. Wake up 10 minutes earlier and write something down. Take 10 minutes before you go to bed and write something down. Is 10 minutes enough? Nope. Will you write shit in those 10 minutes? It’s very likely. If you keep doing it, will you finally break through the drivel you’ve been writing — because even if we told ourselves while we were writing it that it was great, being honest, it was shit — and find that golden idea that’ll make you novelist or a poet or whatever it is you think you are but haven’t accomplished yet? Probably not. There is no 1–1 correlation between the daily writing you need to do and any kind of success you seek, whatever variety.

This is what will happen if you write every day, when you have 5 or 10 minutes, or when you don’t but do such as when you’re waiting for a meeting to start or when there’s 4 minutes until you clock out: it will eliminate time as your oppressor. You’ll never have enough, but you’ll see 10 minutes is longer than you think. And if you really keep at it, you’ll realize that when that 10 minutes is up, you’ve fallen in love with the idea you’ve been writing about. In the four hours between this 10 minutes and the next 10 minutes you have available to write, you’ll have written countless pages in your head which you’ll try to get down in those next 10 minutes, but fail. But you will be driven to write the rest of it. Suddenly you’re not as tired as you thought. Or you have 30 minutes before your hot date. Or you blow off that date because you gotta write! Once you keep doing it, and at first, it’s just doing it, you’ll see all your excuses evaporate. Because in your head, there’s a stack of reasons you can’t write, and that stack turned into a wall and you think about each brick in that wall and instead of writing your counting bricks and wringing your hands over how you’re going to manage each of these bricks. All of this requires mental space and energy, which you’re wasting because your mind is not free to dream and write.

You don’t have time to write. No one does. But if it’s what you want do do, then you have to do it. You have to be a love-struck teenager and writing needs to be the object of your love. The one you stay up with till 3 am talking on the phone, the one you send countless texts and emails to, whose name you doodle on every surface, who you dream about all times, who, to anyone outside the circumstances, seems like a hopeless pipe dream, a waste of time. You surely wouldn’t as a love-struck teenager listen to anyone about the logic or feasibility of the depth of your love. Perhaps there are some things from our teenage years we should hold onto, more securely than we hold onto our excuses for not writing.

Write.